Archive for May, 2009

A very fast and simple way for a local business to enhance their organic listing on a Google search results page is to add their business details to Google local search using the form at http://www.google.com/local/add/lookup

The process takes about five minutes to complete for a basic listing and the result is worth every minute. The image below shows how your listing will appear in the “Local business results” at the top of the main results page.

This example above is a screenshot of the results for http://www.google.com/search?q=home+inspector+adelaide and I’m happy to say that three of my customers are on the first page when a search is conducted for “home inspector adelaide”. If you need your local business to appear on the first page of Google when a potential customer searches for your product or service see http://www.sthwind.com/services/search-optimisation.php for more information. (End of plug.)

Once you’ve registered and verified your listing you will have a free account with Google local business. From the account home page you can edit and add listings to include product photos and create online coupons.

Finally here’s a useful and free tool that you might be interested in, a web dashboard where you can see what’s happening with your website traffic, http://www.google.com/lbc. It’s a light version of Google Analytics. A good article about the dashboard is at http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/06/01/google-local-lures-small-businesses-with-their-own-web-dashboard/

The Google Webmaster Central blog is where the people at Google try to explain their systems to us in simple terms that we can all understand. Worth reading are a couple of posts about exactly how the Googlebot crawls websites written as ‘dates’ between the bot and a website.

The first post (date) is about how the Googlebot identifies itself, what kind of files it accepts for reading and a little tip about how not to use the robots.txt file. First date with the Googlebot: Headers and compression

In the second post the site and the bot exchange a series of letters discussing the best ways to deal with different types of redirects plus a good tip about flagging unmodified content. Date with Googlebot, Part II: HTTP status codes and If-Modified-Since